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That would be a very valuable lab, IF students hadn't been explicitly trained in opposite behaviour for a decade by then.

I lived a very similar experience:

My 4th year computer science professor in software engineering assigned us a four-phase programming assignment for the semester.

My teammate and I spent several sleepless days on the first assignment, and felt some of the requirements were contradictory. Finally we reached out to the professor, and he formally clarified the requirements. We asked him, "well OK, if requirements are unclear, what are we as students supposed to DO?!?" and he answered - exactly what you did; ask the user/client for clarification. "OK, but what if we hadn't, what if we just made assumptions and built on those??". And his eyes twinkled in a gentle smile.

My team mate and I had worked in the industry as summer students at this point, and felt this was the best most realistic course university has offered - not the least because after every phase, you had to switch code with a different team and complete next phase on somebody else's (shoddy, broken, undocumented) code. This course was EXACTLY what "real world" was like - but rest of the class was trained on "Assignment 1, question 1, subquestion A", and wrote a letter of complaint to the Dean.

I understood their perspective, but boy, were they in for a surprise when they joined the workforce :)

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poincaredisk 2 days ago | parent [-]

>That would be a very valuable lab, IF students hadn't been explicitly trained in opposite behaviour for a decade by then.

I teach students sometimes. I briefly considered whenever I should give them such important lesson. Very briefly: my job is to teach students my specialty, not give them life lessons. Why would I deal with potentially angry students for doing something that's not obvious I'm allowed to do? Hell, it's not even obvious it that would be a "good" (career advancing) lesson.

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zdragnar 2 days ago | parent [-]

Being in a professional field means being the expert in the room for your area of responsibility. That means being able to translate information into, and out of, the terms of art in your profession.

This is generally considered a "soft skill", but it really should be a recurring part of any technical curriculum.

There are generalizations of the concept- tailoring your message to your audience in public speaking, or charitable interpretation and seeing from another's perspective in debate, but the narrow case of "interpret these requirements and identify problems with them" is a good way to demonstrate an understanding of the domain.

	▲	poincaredisk 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I agree, that's a valuable skill. But do I, an expert in a narrow (very far removed from any soft skills) field, am the person who should teach it? When some students raise a complaint, how will I explain to the University management that this twist, even though completely unrelated to what I am supposed to teach, was actually a good idea? I just say, even with good intentions, the incentives are not aligned with teachers going too far out of line.